Topics – Society

While the Conservative government continues to fortify our borders and tighten restrictions on immigration, our culpability in the unprecedented levels of migration worldwide has never been clearer. From Canadian mining companies in Latin America to the occupation of Afghanistan, our overseas adventures continue to violently dispossess people around the globe.

In August 2010, the MV Sun Sea arrived in Vancouver carrying 492 Tamil refugees fleeing post-war Sri Lanka. All on board were immediately detained upon arrival in Canada. Nearly a year later, 19 are still in jail.

As the last 10 years have made painstakingly evident, imperial interventions in the Middle East and Pakistan have relied heavily on the conflation of the figure of the Muslim, the immigrant/outsider, and the terrorist within mainstream discourse. It is within this context that many have begun raising alarm over the looming demographic threat posed by domestic Muslim population growth.

Afghanistan, and the surrounding region, has been in the crosshairs of imperial expansionists for centuries. In 1600, Queen Elizabeth I set the East India Company on its march northward through India. This expansion of the British empire was confronted in Afghanistan in the early 19th century by the southward expansion of the Russian empire, instigating a series of wars known as the “Great Game.”

The first step toward emancipation must be recognition of the shared struggle between all those considered less valuable by our state and social structures. Liberation can only happen collectively and across all communities simultaneously. Freedom at the expense of others’ freedom is not freedom at all, but a different and twisted kind of enslavement.

In news coverage of violence, women are almost always portrayed as victims. Whether they are worthy, innocent victims in need of rescue (“virgins”), as in the case of Afghan women post-9/11, or unworthy, culpable victims to be ignored or incarcerated (“vamps”), as with Indigenous women in Canada, depends on their strategic value to the forces in power.

Butler’s theory of gender-as-performance remains her best-known contribution to academia, but for the last decade her attention has gradually shifted from gender to the politics of war. Now she’s struggling with questions like, whose deaths matter, and why are some deaths grievable but others not?

As a female-bodied pastor, I work in a profession where people still openly argue about whether or not women should be allowed to serve, and I am regularly called father on the streets by bewildered people who don’t have any language for a minister who wears a bra. This photo essay seeks to dramatize the pressures of performance, repression of sexuality and particularly the suppression of breasts and menstruation that affect the lives and work of female clergy.

“In my view the law plays a sufficient contributory role in preventing a prostitute from taking steps that could reduce the risk of such violence.” With these concluding remarks by Justice Susan Himel, the laws that kept sex work illegal in Ontario were struck down in November 2010. The ruling, however, has been stayed, pending an appeal by the federal government that’s scheduled to begin in June, 2011.